With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, including cellphone devices, handheld devices, handheld computers, smartphones, PDAs, etc., there is a need for improving the user interface experience by increasing user text input speed, reducing text entry errors, and improving the overall user experience.
Mobile devices with capacitive or resistive touch capabilities often utilize a touch screen keyboard, a hardware keyboard, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, or combination of the four, for entry of text input. Touch screen keyboards enable larger displays for videos, web pages, email, etc., without the requirement of a physical keyboard. Because touch screen keyboards are software-based, they can be easily adjusted for different languages, screen orientation, and key layouts. Furthermore, touch screen keyboards can be augmented with widgets for word prediction and disambiguation candidates.
Users of devices with touch screens, especially mobile devices, have varying abilities and styles of entering text. In particular, some users prefer to type large chunks of text input fairly rapidly, and do not stop to review and correct the entered text until complete phrases, sentences, or complete messages have been entered. Similarly, users entering text using speech recognition or handwriting recognition do not want to stop to review their text input until having entered completed phrases, sentences, or complete messages. Predictive typing assistance software, such as T9, only offers word prediction candidates as users type. After users finish typing, they are usually left without any assistance, and must then struggle to edit text by placing cursors in-between characters in order to proof and correct text.
Therefore, there exists ample opportunity for improvement in technologies related to facilitating user input on electronic devices by providing more helpful and accurate assistance in the text correction process in order to accelerate user text entry and reduce user input error rates.